The new world that will unfold
There is a chapter in Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind in which he explores and bemoans the guidelines for describing previously uncontacted tribes. His salient point is that the categories that form the framework of our thinking such as economy and culture are not categories that belong to or describe the tribes concerned. “How does the economy of this tribe function?” can be a seriously misleading question. The more it seems unavoidable to us, the more damaging it is.[1] I want to use this brilliant work to illuminate how the world that will emerge from our current global difficulties and the collapse of our culture may not be described within our current categories. And economy is central to that. What we call economy and understand by economy is not a description of how the world that will unfold will be.
In Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk, this difficulty is treated at some length. Yunkaporta is an Australian Aboriginal, in part, and what he describes is that he cannot describe what he needs to say within the categories that western readers expect to find in a book. What he needs to do is to talk about what he sees in the colonial culture that has all but destroyed Australia. The concepts he needs are not to be found in what he needs to describe. The problems generated by colonial thought are intrinsic to that thought and cannot be sorted out without finding a radically different place to stand. The firm anchoring in his own thought systems has been his problem in writing the book at all. To give an example of his difficulty, he speaks of the dominant personal pronoun in the languages he is coming from, which is “us-two”.
Three links to get us started
Firstly, the social structure that underpins Yunkaporta’s knowledge is a dense web: he is related in various ways to various people and tribes right across Australia. This is a social structure that would give an adequate grounding to Nora Bateson’s concept of warm data. Where knowledge is essentially process, we should expect a mirroring of structure between the knower and the known. This is what we meant in previous blog posts when we spoke of the social system as one of the five landscape functions: there can be no separation of how the landscape works and how the people in that landscape relate to each other and to the work they do on and through the landscape.
Secondly, we can mention R. D. Laing — ‘Ronnie’ to his friends. He knew, in a deep and practical way, that madness exists between stigmatised people and the society that chooses to stigmatise them. My mentor Noel Cobb worked with Ronnie in the house in the East End for people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The whole set-up was challenging to all concerned because the behaviour of the residents was certainly unconventional, but the breakthrough was to locate the mental health issues in the interaction of residents with society.
The third is with David Bohm’s understanding of thought as a system. I have previous understood this rather intellectually, as being a problem from logical deduction and the flaws of inference. But here we must take on board that not only can we not think straight, but that all our more deep-rooted and instinctual reactions and judgements are likely to be wrong. Most of what we do in our lives is blind and damaging; that is a tough call to accept.
To pull those links together: you cannot understand colonial thought except by listening deeply to colonised people and their experience of disruption and dislocation; you cannot understand what is wrong with the data we rely on except from a place such as warm data which is properly contextual; you cannot understand the madness of society except through the distress of those you label mad; and you cannot see the systemic flaws in your thought without the effort to assert a contrasting system.
A David Graeber quote for our purpose here in thinking about the world that will unfold: “an economy is ultimately just the way we take care of each other, that all real work is ultimately care work.”
This is highly congruent with the original Greek meaning of the household: a household on a Greek island kingdom would include slaves and craftspeople as well as extended family, and care was care of the whole or it was nothing. It is a classic colonial thought to say that care of family comes before care of slaves. Of course, we need not have a definition of economics that we can navigate by: the best we can do at this stage is to notice that no academic and no-one in the media would ever use ‘economics’ as a term to refer to a holistic and balanced looking after a disparate body of people.
Unfolding
Forgive me, but I can’t stand the New Age perception that the current crises are leading to a new stage of consciousness. That thought seems to betray people with hope and good intentions into losing their remaining power. What is unfolding is largely dystopian (so far) and can get much, much worse. What we are trying to pay attention to is rather that both the good and the awful in what is to come will not be usefully described or navigated in the terms we are accustomed to. We are far too deeply mired in the thought processes that are leading to our destruction to be able to recognise how we are causing that destruction.
This is not climate change rhetoric or the catastrophic decay of our political systems. This is not simply the assumption of simplicity in fearfully complex situations. This is full-on misperception, full-on swallowing of lying narratives, full-on avoidance of any critical thinking in the face of the mainstream media corrupt spin (yes you, BBC!) and abject denial of the real situation. For instance, if GOP is wholly owned by oil and coal interests who will destroy the planet before they forgo profits, what are we actually doing? Is this example about economics? About capitalism? About political systems? I am trying to point to a different set of concepts that allows increasingly powerless people to see where their fight for survival lies.
I’m also reading Two Cheers for Anarchism, by James C Scott, one of my heroes in this space. He says we need an anarchist squint to see what is happening, that liberation has never come from institutions or from formal organisation. Liberation comes from large groups of people with mutual values fighting for their mutual liberation. Liberation is always overtaken by institutions that reinstate bondage while professing to act in the interests of the people concerned. You can spot these institutions by the fact they never enquire from the people concerned where their interests lie; they just assume and do statistical analysis. When did educationalists last listen deeply to what liberation via education might mean?
So, the new world that will unfold is deeply mutual and leaderless. It is about understanding solidarity more than it is about values. It is intrinsically impenetrable to anyone seeking to understand where the interests of this solidarity lie. It is akin to Occupy Wallstreet in its ability to spread like wildfire and attract support from the most unlikely places. It is an anti-politics, a samizdat, a forest of tiny splinters and a constant morphing into something else. How do we know this? We know simply because visible organisation is always co-opted by the powers of repression. Always, so that all that is left are forms that cannot be recognised by the powers that be.[2]
Signs and portents
If all professional journalists work basically within the existing power system, working on releases and leaks and spin, then journalists who actually do independent research are not even recognised. (Who classes Julian Assange as a key journalist?) This means that the information and insights you need in order to navigate the traps set out for you cannot be found from the press as we know it: in fact, you would do better to believe the opposite of what you are told. That is a tough call to actually do, to actually rehearse for yourself what the obverse of the intended message might be.[3]
We should also be following the money. Who benefits from the weird policy and policy swings? Which gaffes are just gaffes, and which have a purpose? Our purpose in navigating the traps is simply to maintain degrees of freedom, room to operate. We must not be pulled into orbit around agendas that are there to distract us. Bread and circuses in its modern manifestation. You are allowed to vote, to protest, to petition about selected things that don’t matter. Who benefits from the distraction and from the predatory delay?
We can also look at our appetite for “news”. I have never had a television and I have stopped listening to the radio even in the car — I look at the FT online, but less and less. If we have a strong appetite for “news” it is probably somewhere between habit and addiction. The media first need us in their numbers, and then need to satisfy their owners’ agenda, and only then need to provide a service. I am too tuned in to the lack of service to be able to stand what gets served up.
This is like a diet of any kind. As we recover from being fed addictive pap, we start to need real food. Where we find our authentic sources starts to shape our mutuality. As I write, things are unfolding in Minsk. Apparently, arrangements for last night’s demonstration were changed not long before the event and everyone still knew where to go and what to do. Human history before mass manipulation consisted of such “knowing” for everyone not part of an elite.
Paolo Freire
The great Brazilian educator of the poor insisted that, for oppressed and neglected children, words must mean what they say they mean before there can be any question of shared understanding. If language is used to oppress, why would I learn it? I need my own language with concepts that recognise me as human. Nora Bateson talks about the rap revolution and NWA in the same way; a new language and new music because the old was so thoroughly oppressive. I like that example because people found the revolution both extremely offensive and attractive. If you haven’t seen the film, watch it to see how the old crumbles.
There is so much we would like to see saved in the world that is unfolding, but that is not how the process works. Our main message here is that those things, perhaps classical music or theoretical physics, belong in categories that cannot exist in the new world: we will see them completely differently. Connections and context all realigned, but that description is still too mechanical.
What Freire did for language, Yunkaporta is doing for culture in the broadest sense. Culture is about who we think we are and what our lives depend on. As we strip away the things that we think we depend on, but which turn out to be harmful or working against us, pure mutual solidarity comes more and more to the fore. People who experienced the Stasi or KGB and their network of informers know exactly what is at stake here. Kafka’s work describes precisely the strangeness and alienation of seeing through the charades of the elites.
Above all, this cannot be about answers. An answer is an answer to a problem, and we are claiming that the formulation of problems is already hopelessly flawed, part of the problem itself. Consultants to organisations, who are not themselves merely flunkeys and yes-men, will recognise that even in technical domains, what people think the problem consists of is simply the reflection of wider misconceptions. Helping people recognise the unfolding of the new is the whole job.
[1] Ruminate on that: the more it seems unavoidable to us, the more damaging it is. Even having grown up with Batesonian thinking her whole life, Nora Bateson says that she sometimes struggles to avoid mechanically-oriented language and metaphors. The buried, unchallengeable, unavoidable things are exactly the water in which the fish swims.
[2] I can’t help but think of the authorised and organised ‘protest’ marches in London these past few years. Sixty or seventy years ago, the authorities didn’t know what to do with a march, so it had an impact. These days, they’re licenced and kettled and are completely within the rulebook of business-as-usual — impactless.
[3] An example: for all that I know that the UK government have willfully avoided knowing the extent of COVID-19, and have changed the reporting methodology several times, it’s still far too easy to get sucked into comparing the official numbers about things pandemic
